Earlier this year I announced to my coaching group that I’d destroyed my business. And I had. I had no clients, and no money coming in, and it was all my own fault. I’d become complacent and gone chasing after the new, shiny thing. I’d got carried away with my online creative space and was following a dream of making money from my cartoon sheep. Which is all very well if I’m still writing for a main living, but the clients I’d had in the pipeline fell away for one reason or another, and I wasn’t doing the activity I needed to keep filling it up. And so it was that I woke up one morning and realised what I’d done. Idiot!!! Or so I thought. Turns out it was the best business move I’d ever made.
The best move ever because I was forced to get creative. The best move ever because I had nothing to lose. The best move ever because the two people who coach and mentor me really came through for me, and I realised the level of support I have around me.
I went back to basics: what I do, and why I do it. I’d struggled to articulate this for years, now it was easy: I write stories about businesses, to help them get chosen by the people they love to serve. I had an emergency call with my coach and mentor, Judith Morgan, and between us we came up with the three services that would form my core offering. Out went all the stuff I felt I had to offer, in came the three things I love to write more than anything else: blog posts, success stories, and about pages. My coaching buddy, Osmaan Sharif, helped me come up with a marketing plan, and my web designer did a super-fast website redesign for me. Within a few short weeks my pipeline was filling up and I had three new clients. I was back in business. Whew!!
It felt like a fresh start and I began to look at what else I could do to help businesses get chosen by the people they love to serve. I was aware of the limitations of relying solely on finding writing clients for my income, so I came up with a product/service, Blog CPR; and a product, Business Blogging Toolkit. For businesses that want to write their own blog posts, and want either a helping hand, or the tools to help them make it work.
It’s not something I’d recommend, but destroying my business has made me more decisive, clearer about what I do and why I do it, and it’s helped me fall back in love with The Write Angles. I’ve also learnt so much about the support network I’ve created for myself, and about how much I’m capable of. And that’s been the best lesson of all. Because now I know the world’s my oyster and if I want it, I can do it.
What would you do, if you woke up tomorrow and had to start again?